Bobbi

Today was the annual trip to Morgantown to visit my old friend Bobbi. She is my only transgender friend but that is the least interesting thing about her. She collects coins. Bricks. Blouses (more than 400). She sells at Valu It, an indoor flea market. And on eBay. She buys the contents of houses and then spends years selling them. She is extremely smart about some things and 100% naive about others. She used to show up at my door with her latest Goodwill purchase, some of the ugliest things I’d ever seen--giant lamps whose bases were the figures of French dandies, for example. She’d swear they were highly valuable because they were signed--SIGNED! If one tenth of the stuff she thought was highly valuable was worth 10% of her estimate, she’d be a rich woman, instead of just scraping by in the house she built for her parents in Johnstown, PA. She’s also a poet. She’s also been taking classes at the Johnstown campus of University of Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Her last class was on terrorism. She’s a spiritual seeker--of course I met her at a UU church. She’s in her 80s and is still working incredibly hard. She spoils her three sons. She is deeply hurt that her wife of many years cannot accept her gender reassignment. She is a loyal and generous friend. She’s an astute observer of sexism--seeing the difference between how she was treated as a man and how she’s treated as a woman. She’s written a lengthy autobiography. She makes the best fudge on earth. And she is funny as all get out.

She makes me think about the skills of a novelist. A real writer could draw a word picture of her that would somehow capture her essence. When I think of the characters I’ve known in my life, I feel totally incapable of putting together a string of descriptions or anecdotes that does them justice. That list above doesn’t in anyway convey her unique personality. As in all art forms, I am most in awe of painters, musicians, and writers who do things I couldn’t dream of doing.
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